Time-blocking for a to-do list that never fits the day
by Andreas Tissen · · updated
Count the items on today's list. Say there are eleven. Now count the hours you have left after the meetings, lunch and the time it takes to answer what arrives: maybe four. Eleven tasks do not fit into four hours, and nothing in the format of a list tells you so, because a list has no field for how long anything takes.
So the leftovers show up at six in the evening, when it is too late to choose which ones they should have been.
Giving the day a size
Time-blocking means giving the tasks of a day a place in the day: you divide the working hours into blocks and decide what goes into each one. Cal Newport describes it in Deep Work (2016). He plans every minute of his working day this way, and when the day breaks the plan, he redraws the blocks for the hours that are left.
Once the day has a fixed size and the blocks fill it, the next task visibly has nowhere to go, and you decide in the morning, not at six, what moves to tomorrow.
Newport's precision is optional. Three blocks cover many days: deep work, meetings, and shallow work such as replies, invoices and booking the train.
Calendar here, list there
The usual setup splits the method across two programs. The blocks live in a calendar app and the tasks live in a to-do app, so planning the day means copying tasks into calendar entries. Nobody updates either in the evening, and after a week the calendar shows what you meant to do, the list shows what is still open, and neither shows what happened.
Spillover has no place either. The deep block ends with the draft half done, and the rest of it slides into tomorrow without a note, or gets lost.
Blocks as branches
Pando is the outliner I build: a tree of bullets that you use in the browser or on the phone, and that Claude can read and write once you connect it. A day there is a bullet with one child per block and the tasks under the blocks, so the tasks and the plan are the same thing.
Planning is moving tasks under a block. Whatever you did not move does not fit today. When the deep block ended, the summary was still open, so it went on its own orange "Spillover" line with the day it moves to, and written down like that it becomes the first candidate for Wednesday's deep block instead of an item somewhere at the bottom of a list.
The small jobs all go into the one-hour shallow block, which is how the tasks from the two-minute rule stop breaking up the morning. If your days fill with things started and not finished, the work-in-progress limit in personal kanban goes well with this. The picture is the blocked-day template after one Tuesday; the template also keeps one finished example day for reference.
Claude carries and counts
With Pando connected to Claude over MCP, two jobs can go to Claude. Neither needs judgement. Each morning it creates today's day in the same shape and carries yesterday's unticked tasks and spillover lines into the matching blocks, keeping the orange mark. On Friday it counts two numbers for the line at the bottom: blocks planned this week and blocks that held.
After a few weeks that count shows how many deep blocks a normal week of yours actually holds, and you can plan with that number. The prompt for both jobs sits in the template's agent bullet, and it tells Claude to add, reorder or replan nothing else.
The free plan holds 5,000 bullets; Pro is 3 EUR a month without a limit. To plan your days in blocks with Claude carrying the spillover, create a free account and connect Claude.